The scent of narcissus
It is a collection of stories that carry within it the harvest of the years. I derived its ideas from my daily observations, experiences, and coexistence with my students and colleagues, but it is not related to a specific character, as I formulated it to be a general situation that sometimes overlaps with more than one experience and more than one character, as the reader will live with the woman who sacrifices... She gave her life for the sake of others in “The Handkerchief”, the oppressed girl in “Abeer”, the arrogant girl “Shatha Al-Narjis”, the struggling teacher “Professor Marzouk”, the unfaithful friend “In the Wind”, and honoring parents “The Moment of Birth” and the downtrodden employee “Skyscrapers”. There is a view into the past through the story “Bars of Silence.”
I wrote this collection during my participation in the Aqdar Writing Program, which was organized by the Ministry of Education two years ago. The Ministry of Education printed limited copies without signing a contract or monopoly on copyright, simply to publish examples of the program’s work during that period, and then we were left with the option of publishing it, as it received remarkable demand and was chosen. One of the secondary schools in Sharjah considered it the best publication last year, and given the insistence of my colleagues and students to obtain copies of it, especially the keenness of a large number of female students to search for it in the exhibition, and the disappointment that it was not published, prompted me to take this step and come to your home, which has become an edifice of the word and a door of culture. To publish my collection, I ask the Almighty God for success.
We are a generation without farewell, says the German writer Wolfgang Borchert, summarizing the tragedy of his generation that was led into World War II without anyone saying goodbye to it. Perhaps Borchert is the voice most capable of expressing this generation, and that war that left massive material and spiritual devastation in Germany. It also left literary ruin.
Borchert left behind a collection of short stories that his fellow Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Heinrich Böll, describes as “complete masterpieces,” while Egyptian writer Ibrahim Aslan sees in his stories “a sublime expression of the ferocity of all wars without a single direct word.”
In this book, we present to the reader a selection of these stories, and what attracted us to them is the human approach to major topics, such as war and death, love and the feeling of loss, and the artistic expression of them.
There are things that people cannot describe.
There are words that we cannot accept, trivial things that make the only hope of our heart go away, that make our hopes disappointed and thrown away without fulfillment, those wishes that took most of our time to achieve. A few words from them changed the course of our lives, they turned that beautiful dream into a hideous nightmare. That paradise that we imagined was nothing but hell. We were living those dreams with great hope, but we were very disappointed. We were tired and despaired of them, but we will not give up, and we will not let their words and actions affect our dreams. The desires that the heart desires force us to bear them, force us to resist them. We will not break easily, except when our dreams are achieved. We will break because we achieved the desire of our heart after long patience. We will break. We will gather together again. We will be stronger than we were before. Be sure that you can.
Before thirty
Before Thirty is a short text that tells the story of several people who went through different circumstances and paradoxes. Life takes a turn for heroes several times, and they go through situations they were not prepared for, and some of them are forced to make painful decisions for themselves.
There are no names for the women in this book. Rather, they are just bodies. It is through the body that society recognizes them, and through it they also identify themselves. This often alienated body is the same body that deserves to be celebrated and celebrated.
By masterfully combining, with innovative writing techniques, the real and the imagined, and carelessly collapsing the boundaries between psychological realism, science fiction, comedy, horror, fantasy, and magical realism, Carmen María Machado pours out in Her Body and Other Parties her vision of the contradictory world of real women. : The beautiful, the funny, the strange, the dark, and the terrifying, alike. This contradiction is etched in their experiences and daily lives, between push and pull, independence and helplessness, to ultimately reveal the surreal meaning of being a “woman.”
In this book there are pictures from the world of childhood in its openness to the world of adults, snapshots from the lives of children who receive their first lessons in the school of life and survival, and for the first time look out from the window of their reality and their ages at the world of adults and the prospects for the future that are shaped by an important historical and social stage, which is the Spanish Civil War: Seriousness, fun, drinking, singing, an atmosphere of war, and the sound of bombs. Waiting for a father who will not return, abandoning homes, being displaced from homes, and crossing lines. A life in shelters, a life in mines, the dreams of youth, and teenage love
Trees that stand for birds:
A collection of stories by Emirati writer Obaid Ibrahim Bu Melha. The stories revolve between surreal and absurd sarcasm, human conflict, and the mixing of concepts and ideas with chaos, to discuss the concept of literature and writing, the meaning of life, and the struggle between good and evil in the human soul.
In the introduction to his first collection of short stories, the Chinese storyteller Lu Xun says that he found himself driven to write because he felt intense loneliness. He was not able to forget, or, rather, he was not able to forget completely; So, he wrote stories about the past.
This is exactly what prompted me to write: overwhelming loneliness. I also failed to forget, so I wrote what remained in my memory about Syria before the war.
Sometimes, exiles write about nostalgia for a country they miss and wish to return to. This is not like the nostalgia of Syrians: the country has completely changed, and even disappeared. We long for a place that does not exist, except in memory. And memory, as you know, writhes, colors, and churns. I am no exception, and my memory does not claim to be completely faithful to reality, but I tried hard to write exactly what you dictated to me.
Hopes, dreams, and losses are all fading quickly, and so is the country, and what remains of it is in us: as if it were a half-smile, or a summer cloud, or a bright comet passing quickly, only to disappear completely moments later, before the eyes of curious, bored viewers, indifferent to its fate...
